The Struggle for Hong Kong: A Decolonization Lens
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About the talk:
This talk offers a new interpretation of popular protests in Hong Kong since 1997, when Britain handed its sovereignty over the territory to China. While most academic and journalistic accounts call these "movements for democracy and freedom," Ching Kwan Lee argues that the totality of people’s demands and aspirations over two decades actually amounted to a decolonization struggle against the legacies and realities of British and Chinese colonialisms respectively. A central question this talk addresses is: how and why did ordinary citizens transform themselves from complacent colonized subjects to rebellious agents of history?
About the speaker:
Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology at UCLA, with a research focus on political sociology, labor, development, popular struggles, global China, global South, and comparative ethnography. She is the author of three award-winning monographs on contemporary China’s turn to capitalism: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007), and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Recipient of the Distinguished Career in Political Sociology Award by the American Sociological Association, she also writes on Hong Kong’s political movements, including her most recent book, Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle (2025).
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